Jacques Rivette (1928 - )
Biography
Jacques Rivette (born March 1, 1928) is a French film director.
With Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette is considered to be the most experimental of the French New Wave directors. Like Godard, he had a background in film criticism, but he also loved popular American cinema, especially genre directors such as Robert Aldrich and Frank Tashlin.
Rivette's stories progress in unconventional ways - often following multiple plot lines that can be romantic, mysterious, and comic all at once and employing extensive improvisation. As a result, his films are often extremely long ( the infamous Out 1 clocked in at 13 hrs, although a 4 1/2 hour cut was later produced.) and many of them are rarely seen.
In 1950, Rivette joined the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, and began to write film criticism for the Gazette du Cinema, a small film journal. During this time, he made his first short films, Aux Quatre Coins (1950), Le Quadrille (1950), and Le Divertissment (1952). In '52, Rivette began to write for Cahiers du Cinema with several other young critics who would form the core of the French New Wave: Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol. Rivette championed American directors of the 40's and 50's, specifically the work of Howard Hawks, John Ford, Nicholas Ray, and Fritz Lang. In 1958, he began to work on his first feature using the borrowed equipment and short ends of film stock. He finished Paris Nous Apparteint two years later.
Celine and Julie Go Boating is perhaps Rivette's most famous and best loved work. His other important films also include Out 1, L'Amour fou, Paris Nous Appartient, and La Belle Noiseuse. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Rivette [Mar 2005]
Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) - Jacques Rivette
Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Celine and Julie Go Boating) is a 1974 movie directed by Jacques Rivette.
Celine and Julie Go Boating is a hypnotic, circular film, which starts slowly with the meeting of Julie (Dominique Labourier), a shy librarian, and Celine (Juliet Berto), a nightclub musician, in a library reading room and ends in a madcap murder mystery involving bloody handprints, time travel, magic candy, and, yes, a boat.
More satisfying and skilled than Ingmar Bergman's Persona in its depiction of identity swapping between two women, Celine and Julie Go Boating eschews psychology to pursue comedy and suspense in electrifying fashion. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%E9line_et_Julie_vont_en_bateau [Mar 2005]
The Nun/La Réligieuse (1966) - Jacques Rivette
This blissfully domestic scene actually portrays an equally blissful all-Lesbian convent. By its very neutrality, it conveys the "secrecy" of this artist's style. Diderot's anti-clerical classic provides the basis for one of the few and certainly one of the most sophisticated anti-Catholic films yet made.Banned by the censors, and cause celebre of post-war French cinema, this chilling melodrama is based on Diderot's famous 18th century anti-clerical classic. It traces the life of a young girl forced to take the veil, equating, ironically, the tyranny of sadistic cruelty with that of erotic love; the corruption of the convent with that of the outer world. A calculated artificiality marks the film's progression from austere cruelty to luxuriant decadence. In its relentless portrayal of the doom of the innocent, it becomes a plea for free- dom and tolerance far transcending the church issue. The supreme irony comes with the nun's final "escape" to a hostile world, prostitution, and death. -- Film As a Subversive Art (1974) - Amos Vogel
Paris Belongs to us/Paris nous appartient (1960) - Jacques Rivette
This enigmatic, feature-length "thriller" -- abrupt, elliptic, paranoid -- enmeshes suspects, victims, and seekers alike in a shadowy mystery of murder and suicide, possibly linked to a secret worldwide conspiracy. The film's hallucinatory power and ideological preoccupations have been widely compared to Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad. "The fruit of an astonishing persistence over several years to bring to the screen a personal vision of the world today; a universe of anguished confusion and con- spiracy. It is the fusion of poetic vision and realist impression which makes it a film of foremost im- portance to us." -- Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Jean Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Resnais, Francois Truffaut, Agnes Varda. -- Film As a Subversive Art (1974) - Amos VogelL'Amour fou/Mad Love (1969) - Jacques Rivette
This article is about the Jacques Rivette movie, for the collection of poems by André Breton see mad love.
L'amour fou is a 1969 movie directed by Jacques Rivette.
The plot of L'amour fou is quite thin. It follows the dissolution of a marriage between Claire, an actress (played by Bulle Ogier), and Sebastien, her director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon). It is black and white with two different film stocks employed in different times throughout the film (and two different aspect ratios). The film focuses on a long cycle of self-destruction in Claire and Sebastien's relationship.
The central event in the films narrative is a three week period of preparation by a theater group for a production of Racine's version of Andromaque. A crew films the preparations of the theater company in handheld 16mm, while the rest of the film is shot in 35mm. This framework allows Rivette to focus on the act of direction, in the formation of an artwork and the dissolution of a relationship. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Amour_fou [Nov 2005]
La Belle Noiseuse (1991) - Jacques Rivette
La Belle Noiseuse (1991) - Jacques Rivette [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
La Belle Noiseuse est un film français de Jacques Rivette, sorti en 1991, durée 244 min, scénario : Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Jacques Rivette, d'après la nouvelle de Honoré de Balzac Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu publiée en 1831.
La Belle Noiseuse a remporté le grand prix du jury du festival de Cannes en 1991. --http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Belle_Noiseuse [Mar 2005]
see also: Jacques Rivette
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